10.WILLIAM BURROUGHS

by Steven Shaviro

"Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm?" In this epigram,
Burroughs suggests that parasitism--corruption, plagiarism, surplus
appropriation--is in fact conterminous with life itself. The tapeworm
doesn't simply happen to attach itself to an intestine that was getting
along perfectly well without it. Say rather that the intestine evolved
in the way that it did just in order to provide the tapeworm with a
comfortable or profitable milieu, an environment in which it might
thrive. My intestines are on as intimate terms with their tapeworms as
they are with my mouth, my asshole, and my other organs; the
relationship is as 'intrinsic' and 'organic' in the one case as it is
in the other. Just like the tapeworm, I live off the surplus-value
extracted from what passes through my stomach and intestines. Who's the
parasite, then, and who's the host? The internal organs are parasitic
upon one another; the organism as a whole is parasitic upon the world.
My 'innards' are really a hole going straight through my body; their
contents--shit and tapeworm--remain forever outside of and apart from
me, even as they exist at my very center. The tapeworm is more "me"
than I am myself. My shit is my inner essence; yet I cannot assimilate
it to myself, but find myself always compelled to give it away. (Hence
Freud's equation of feces with money and gifts; and Artaud's sense of
being robbed of his body and selfhood every time he took a shit).
Interiority means intrusion and colonization. Self-identity is
ultimately a symptom of parasitic invasion, the expression within me of
forces originating from outside.

And so it is with language. In Burroughs' famous dictum, language is a
virus. Language is to the brain (and the speaking mouth and the writing
or typing hand, and the listening ear and the reading eyes) as the
tapeworm is to the intestines. Even more so: it may just be possible to
find a digestive space free from parasitic infection (though this is
extremely unlikely), but we will never find an uncontaminated mental
space. Strands of alien DNA unfurl themselves in our brains, just as
tapeworms unfurl themselves in our guts. Burroughs suggests that not
just language, but "the whole quality of human consciousness, as
expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism." This is
not to claim, in the manner of De Saussure and certain foolish
poststructuralists, that all thought is linguistic, or that social
reality is constituted exclusively through language. It is rather to
deprivilege language--and thus to take apart the customary opposition
between language and immediate intuition--by pointing out that
nonlinguistic modes of thought (which obviously exist) are themselves
also constituted by parasitic infiltration. Visual apprehension and the
internal time sense, to take just two examples, are both radically
nonlinguistic; but they too, in their own ways, are theaters of power
and surplus-value extraction. Light sears my eyeballs, leaves its
traces violently incised on my retinas. Duration imposes its
ungraspable rhythms, emptying me of my own thought. Viruses and
parasitic worms are at work everywhere, multiple outsides colonizing
our insides. There is no refuge of pure interiority, not even before
language. Whoever we are, and wherever and however we search, "we are
all tainted with viral origins."

Burroughs' formulation is of course deliberately paradoxical, since
viruses are never originary beings. They aren't self-sufficient, or
even fully alive; they always need to commandeer the cells of an
already-existing host in order to reproduce. A virus is nothing but DNA
or RNA encased in a protective sheath; that is to say, it is a message
--encoded in nucleic acid--whose only content is an order to repeat
itself. When a living cell is invaded by a virus, it is compelled to
obey this order. Here the medium really is the message: for the virus
doesn't enunciate any command, so much as the virus is itself the
command. It is a machine for reproduction, but without any external or
referential content to be reproduced. A virus is a simulacrum: a copy
for which there is no original, emptily duplicating itself to infinity.
It doesn't represent anything, and it doesn't have to refer back to any
standard measure or first instance, because it already contains all the
information--and only the information--needed for its own further
replication. Marx's famous description of capital applies perfectly to
viruses: "dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living
labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."

Reproduction (sexual or otherwise) is often sentimentally regarded as
the basic activity and fundamental characteristic of life. It's only
through reproduction that natural selection does its work. But look a
bit more closely: reproduction is arguably more a viral than a vital
process. It is so far from being straightforwardly 'organic,' that it
necessarily involves vampirism, parasitism, and cancerous simulation.
We are all tainted with viral origins, because life itself is commanded
and impelled by something alien to life. The life possessed by a cell,
and all the more so by a multicellular organism, is finally only its
ability to carry out the orders transmitted to it by DNA and RNA. It
scarcely matters whether these orders originate from a virus, or from
what we conceive as the cell's own nucleus. For this distinction is
only a matter of practical convenience. It is impossible actually to
isolate the organism in a state before it has been infiltrated by
viruses, or altered by mutations; we cannot separate out the different
segments of DNA, and determine which are intrinsic to the organism and
which are foreign. Our cells' own DNA is perhaps best regarded as a
viral intruder that has so successfully and over so long a stretch of
time managed to insinuate itself within us, that we have forgotten its
alien origin. Richard Dawkins suggests that our bodies and minds are
merely "survival machines" for replicating genes, "gigantic lumbering
robots" created for the sole purpose of transmitting DNA. Burroughs
describes language (or sexuality, or any form of consciousness) as "the
human virus." All our mechanisms of reproduction follow the viral logic
according to which life produces death, and death in turn lives off
life. And so remember this the next time you gush over a cute infant.
"Cry of newborn baby gurgles into death rattle and the crystal skull,"
Burroughs writes, "THAT IS WHAT YOU GET FOR FUCKING."

Language is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is
not to indicate or communicate any particular content, so much as to
perpetuate and replicate itself. The problem with most versions of
communications theory is that they ignore this function, and naively
present language as a means of transmitting information. Yet language,
like a virus or like capital, is in itself entirely vacuous: its
supposed content is only a contingent means (the host cell or the
particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates for the
end of self-valorization and self-proliferation. Apart from the medium,
there's no other message. But if language cannot be apprehended in
terms of informational content, still less can it be understood on the
basis of its form or structure, in the manner of Saussure, Chomsky, and
their followers. Such theorists make an equivalent, but symmetrically
opposite, error to that of communications theory. They substitute inner
coherence for outer correspondence, differential articulation for
communicative redundancy, self-reference for external reference; but by
isolating language's self-relational structure or transformational
logic, they continue to neglect the concrete and pragmatic effects of
its violent replicating force. Both communicational and structural
approaches try to define what language is, instead of looking at what
it does. They both fail to come to grips with what J. L. Austin calls
the performative aspect of linguistic utterance: the sense in which
speaking and writing are actions, ways of doing something, and not
merely ways of (con)stating or referring to something. (Of course,
stating and referring are in the last analysis themselves actions).
Language does not represent the world: it intervenes in the world,
invades the world, appropriates the world. The supposed postmodern
"disappearance of the referent" in fact testifies to the success of
this invasion. It's not that language doesn't refer to anything real,
but--to the contrary--that language itself has become increasingly
real. Far from referring only to itself, language is powerfully
intertwined with all the other aspects of contemporary social reality.
It is a virus that has all too fully incorporated itself into the life
of its hosts.

A virus has no morals, as Rosa von Praunheim puts it, talking about
HIV; and similarly the language virus has no meanings. Even saying that
language is performative doesn't go far enough; for it leaves aside the
further question of what sort of act is being performed, and just who
is performing it. It is not "I" who speaks, but the virus inside me.
And this virus/speech is not a freestanding action, but a motivated and
directed one: a command. Morse Peckham, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Wittgenstein all suggest that language is less performative than it is
imperative or prescriptive: to speak is to give orders. To understand
language and speech is to acknowledge these orders: to obey them or
resist them, but to react to them in some way. An alien force has taken
hold of me, and I cannot not respond. Our bodies similarly respond with
symptoms to infection, or to the orders of viral DNA and RNA. As
Burroughs reminds us: "the symptoms of a virus are the attempts of the
body to deal with the virus attack. By their symptoms you shall know
them... if a virus produces no symptoms, then we have no way of knowing
that it exists." And so with all linguistic utterances: I interpret a
statement by reacting to it, which is to say by generating a symptom.
Voices continually call and respond, invoke and provoke other voices.
Speaking is thus in Foucault's sense an exercise of power: "it incites,
it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the
extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always
a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of
their acting or being capable of acting. A set of actions upon other
actions." Usually we obey orders that have been given us, viscerally
and unreflectively; but even if we self-consciously refuse them, we are
still operating under their constraint, or according to their
dictation. Yet since an order is itself an action, and the only
response to an action is another action, what Wittgenstein ironically
calls the "gulf between an order and its execution" always remains. I
can reply to a performance only with another performance; it is
impossible to step outside of the series of actions, to break the chain
and isolate once and for all the `true' meaning of an utterance. The
material force of the utterance compels me to respond, but no
hermeneutics can guarantee or legislate the precise nature of my
response. The only workable way to define "meaning" is therefore to
say, with Peckham, that it is radically arbitrary, since "any response
to an utterance is a meaning of that utterance." Any response
whatsoever. This accounts both for the fascistic, imperative nature of
language, and for its infinite susceptibility to perversion and
deviation. Strands of DNA replicate themselves ad infinitum. But in the
course of these mindless repetitions, unexpected reactions
spontaneously arise, alien viruses insinuate themselves into the DNA
sequence, and radiation produces random mutations. It's much like what
happens in the children's game 'Telephone': even when a sentence is
repeated as exactly as possible, it tends to change radically over the
course of time.

We all have parasites inhabiting our bodies; even as we are ourselves
parasites feeding on larger structures. Call this a formula for demonic
or vampiric possession. The great modernist project was to let the
Being of Language shine forth, or some such grandiose notion. If "I"
was not the speaker, the modernists believed, this was because language
itself spoke to me and through me. Heidegger is well aware that
language consists in giving orders, but he odiously idealizes the whole
process of command and obedience. Today, we know better. We must say,
contrary to Heidegger and Lacan, that language never "speaks itself as
language": it's always some particular parasite, with its own interests
and perspective, that's issuing the orders and collecting the profits.
What distinguishes a virus or parasite is precisely that it has no
proper relation to Being. It only inhabits somebody else's dwelling.
Every discourse is an unwelcome guest that sponges off me, without
paying its share of the rent. My body and home are always
infested--whether by cockroaches and tapeworms, or by Martians and
poltergeists. Language isn't the House of Being, but a fairground
filled with hucksters and con artists. Think of Melville's Confidence
Man; or Burroughs' innumerable petty operators, all pulling their
scams. Michel Serres, in his book The Parasite, traces endless chains
of appropriation and transfer, subtending all forms of communication.
(He plays on the fact that in French the word parasite has the
additional connotation of static, the noise on the line that interferes
with or contaminates every message). In this incessant commerce, there
is no Being of language. But there are always voices: voices and more
voices, voices within and behind voices, voices interfering with,
replacing, or capturing other voices.

I hear these voices whenever I speak, whenever I write, whenever I
pick up the telephone. Marshall McLuhan argues that technological change
literally produces alterations in the ratio of our senses. The media
are artificially generated parasites, prosthetic organs, "the
extensions of man." Contemporary electronic media are particularly
radical, as they don't just amplify one sense organ or another, but
represent an exteriorization of the entire human nervous system. Today
we don't need shamans any longer, since modems and FAXes are enough to
put us in contact with the world of vampires and demons, the world of
the dead. Viruses rise to the surface, and appear not just in the
depths of our bodies, but visibly scrawled across our computer and
video screens. In William Gibson's Count Zero, the Haitian loas
manifest themselves in cyberspace: spirits arising in the interstices
of our collectively extended neurons, and demanding propitiation. In
DOOM PATROL, we learn that the telephone is "a medium
through which ghosts might communicate"; words spoken over the phone are "a
conjuration, a summoning." The dead are unable fully to depart from the
electronic world. They leave their voices behind, resonating emptily
after them. The buzzing or static that we hear on the telephone line is
the sum of all the faint murmurings of the dead, blank voices of missed
connections, echoing to infinity. These senseless utterances at once
feed upon, and serve as the preconditions for, my own attempts to
generate discourse. But such parasitic voices also easily become fodder
for centralizing apparatuses of power, like the military's C3I system
(command/control/communication/intelligence). DOOM PATROL
reveals that the Pentagon is really a pentagram, "a spirit trap, a lens to focus
energy." The "astral husks" of the dead are trapped in its depths, fed
to the voracious Telephone Avatar, and put to work on the Ant Farm, "a
machinery whose only purpose is to be its own sweet self." As Burroughs
similarly notes, the life-in-death of endless viral replication is at
once the method and the aim of postmodern arrangements of power.

No moribund humanist ideologies will release us from this dilemma.
Precisely by virtue of their obsolescence, calls to subjective agency,
or to collective imagination and mobilization, merely reinforce the
feedback loops of normalizing power. For it is precisely by regulating
and punishing ourselves, internalizing the social functions of policing
and control, that we arrive at the strange notion that we are producing
our own proper language, speaking for ourselves. Burroughs instead
proposes a stranger, more radical strategy: "As you know inoculation is
the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be effected
through exposure." For all good remedies are homeopathic. We need to
perfect our own habits of parasitism, and ever more busily frequent the
habitations of our dead, in the knowledge that every self-perpetuating
and self-extending system ultimately encounters its own limits, its own
parasites. Let us become dandies of garbage, and cultivate our own
tapeworms, like Uncle Alexander in Michel Tournier's novel
Gemini (Les Météores). Let us
stylize, enhance, and accelerate the processes of
viral replication: for thereby we increase the probability of mutation.
In Burroughs' vision, "the virus plagues empty whole continents. At the
same time new species arise with the same rapidity since the temporal
limits on growth have been removed... The biologic bank is open." It's
now time to spend freely, to mortgage ourselves beyond our means.

Don't try to express "yourself", then; learn rather to write from
dictation, and to speak rapturously in tongues. An author is not a
sublime creator, as Dr. Frankenstein wanted to be. E is more what is
called a channeller, or what Jack Spicer describes as a radio picking
up messages from Mars, or what Jacques Derrida refers to as a
sphincter. Everything in Burroughs' fiction is resolved into and out of
a spinning asshole, which is also finally a cosmic black hole. In
Chester Brown's graphic novel Ed the Happy Clown (originally
published in his comic book Yummy Fur), there is a man who
suffers from a bizarre
compulsion: he can't stop shitting. More comes out than he could ever
possibly have put in. It turns out that his asshole is a gateway to
another dimension, a transfer point between worlds. This other
dimension isn't much different from ours: it has its own hierarchies of
money and power, its own ecological dilemmas, and even its own Ronald
Reagan. The interference between the two worlds leads to a series of
hysterical sexual fantasies, grotesque amputations, and surreal
confusions of identity. But what's important is the process of
transmission, not the nature of the product. That's the secret of
scatology: waste is the only wealth. "Why linger over books to which
the author has not been palpably constrained?" (Bataille). This
constraint, this pressure in my intestines and bowels, marks the
approach of the radically Other. It's in such terms, perhaps, that we
can best respond to George Clinton's famous exhortation: "Free your
mind, and your ass will follow."